Getting the influenza vaccine is your first line of defense. Mice who received higher doses of the vaccine didn’t get sick. “Everyone should get a flu shot to decrease the likelihood of an outbreak and increase community immunity”, he said.

“This is progress, but we still have work to do before we get a truly universal flu vaccine”, said Ted Ross, of UGA, one of the lead authors.

‘The ultimate goal is to be able to vaccinate once and provide lifelong protection, ‘ he said.

“That implies that it’s not very good, because other vaccines you don’t need to get every year”, Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, said in an interview Wednesday. Learn more about where to get the flu vaccine and other flu facts at www.tpchd.org/flu. Additionally, from 140,000 to 710,000 people have been hospitalized and 12,000 to 56,000 have died as a result of the flu annually since 2010.

Influenza expert and chair of the Immunisation Coalition Professor Paul Van Buynder said stronger “super” vaccines were available overseas but because of licensing issues and the purchasing process they could not be accessed here.

As in all workplaces, contagious employees risk infecting others when they turn up for work. They’re far less effective when mismatched.

All those in at-risk groups, as well as healthcare staff, have been urged to get the vaccine.

Every year, the flu is estimated to cause millions of illnesses, said California Department of Public Health (CDPH) officials.

The pursuit of a universal influenza vaccine has been hard.

These COBRA vaccines were created to recognize all H3N2 circulating strains over multiple seasons.

“One of the problems with current influenza vaccines is that the vaccine takes over six months to produce so vaccine manufacturers have to start well before flu season begins”.

The problem is that flu viruses are known to make mutations inside a chicken egg to make the virus better at infecting birds. He and his colleagues chose to try a similar concept with the influenza virus, synthesizing genes that are central to influenza’s phylogenetic tree. These are serious barriers to academic achievement, a significant portion of which could be alleviated by a free flu shot.